The dissonance between scientific evidence, diversity and dialogic pedagogy in the science classroom

ABSTRACT

This study explored the interplay between science teachers’ pedagogical beliefs, scientific evidence, and diversity. This study adopts a sociocultural view of science that views science as a cultural way of knowing, and acknowledges that it is laden with cultural understandings, interpretations, and a language of its own. This paper reports findings derived from qualitative data including interviews and journal field notes observations. The interview sample comprised seven primary school science teachers and nine secondary science teachers. The findings indicated that there was a reliance on dialogic teaching strategies to teach for the school science agenda, but not for the diversity agenda. The findings show that teachers used evidence pedagogy through using their dialogic pedagogy which act as mechanisms to avoid confronting and dealing with diversity, or with the diverse students’ concerns. Teachers use these dialogic pedagogies as a ‘teacher-led dialogues’ tool. Conclusions from the study argue that science teachers need a clear sense of their own views of science in their cultural context in order to be able to understand those of their students and to engage with these views and enhance the use of the dialogic pedagogy by integrating these cultural beliefs into the science discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• In-service teachers
• qualitative research
• scientific evidence
• diversity
• dialogic pedagogy

Acknowledgements

The findings achieved herein are solely the responsibility of the author. I would like to thank the following people for collecting data and contributing to this the Science Education for Diversity (SED) project: Rupert Wegerif, Alun Morgan, Michiel van Eijck, Keith Postlethwaite, Nigel Skinner, Lindsay Hetherington, Saouma BouJaoude, Ng Swee Chin, Choy Siew Chee, Oo Pou San, Chin Fui Chung, Teh Lee Wah, Sugra Chunawala, Chitra Natarajan, Beena Choksi, Ralf van Griethuijsen,Helen Haste, Perry den Brok, and Ayse Savran Gencer.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission,Science in Society, Framework 7 Programme (FP7/2007/2013) under grant agreement 244717.